October 23, 2012

The Nutty Perfesser Does Amazon

Amazon, as you may have heard, has closed a Kindle user's account - and deleted all of the books she'd purchased from her device. No warning, no nothing - just - poof! Not yours anymore. Now she's left with a piece of hardware that she purchased from the company that they have deliberately rendered inoperable (for their offerings). She can still download materials from other sources for her Kindle, of course, but that's hardly the point:

Bekkelun wrote: "This shows the very worst of DRM. If the retailer, in this case Amazon, thinks you're a crook, they will throw you out and take away everything that you bought. And if you disagree, you're totally outlawed. With DRM, you don't buy and own books, you merely rent them for as long as the retailer finds it convenient."

Andy Boxall of Digital Trends said: "Amazon in turn uses the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to take your books and privileges away if it finds you've been naughty."

Actually, they don't have to "find" anything - they can do it any time they want, and they don't need to give a reason.

Local Lefty hate-monger Jack Bogdanski operates in much the same fashion; selectively "banning", without warning nor explanation, any user who dares to disagree with his pronouncements - and if the user is identified as a conservative, even for daring to agree. Evidently, he takes a great deal of pride in stifling any form of discussion; while as a blog owner, that's certainly his right, it points up the hypocrisy of the oh-so-Tolerant™ Left. And he goes even further: not only will he "ban" on whim, he's also likely to go frantically rooting through the blog, searching for any other comment you might have left, and eliminating any that he finds.

It's an amusing image: L'il Johnny, huddled over his keyboard, engrossed in a desperate search for anything that might have a whiff of conservativism; rooting out any trace of evil (in his dysfunctional little mind). This is a guy who, much like Portland mayoral candidate Jefferson Smith, thinks nothing of engaging in abusive behavior - and likely for the same reason: basic civility is an unnatural behavior for them.

It's unclear just how many "bans" he's implemented, though it's likely a sizable number - just in the past couple of months, he's "banned" several folks who occasionally comment here.

Therein lies a big difference between the "Tolerant" Lefty and the conservative: the Lefty blogger won't tolerate discourse that insufficiently feeds his ego; the conservative blog owner believes in freedom of speech.

If you really wish to annoy him, there are ways to bypass his commenting "bans": just sign in from a different IP address and make up a username and email address. You can do this from any public library, internet cafe, wifi connection - or you can merely maintain a list of addresses and inset one into the subnet mask.